27 November 2007 5:04 PM

Most people claim they want free speech. Almost all of them don't really want it at all. It is amazing how quickly they start making exceptions. And, funnily enough, the exceptions always turn out to be people whose views they don't like. That is why it is so important that we protect, above all, the freedoms of those we disapprove of.

It may well be true, as alleged, that the Oxford Union's invitation to the BNP leader Nick Griffin and the discredited historian David Irving was a publicity stunt. The Oxford Union, and its older Cambridge sibling, are both fighting to maintain themselves in a world where even Oxbridge students are far less interested in politics and debate than they used to be. But even if it was a publicity stunt, that doesn't mean it was wrong.

A few years ago I was invited to a debate involving the French National Front leader Jean-Marie le Pen, at the Cambridge Union. There was a similar fuss, except that le Pen wasn't even going to take part in the debate. He would just speak (through an interpreter) and the Union would then debate the issue of free speech. I agreed to take part in this, which involved sharing the debating hall with M. le Pen (he turned out to be a boring, undistinguished old fool, raised to undue prominence by the sterility of French 'centre-ground' politics). I declined to attend the dinner before the event, as I had no desire to break bread with the horrible man, and the Union kindly took me out to a nearby Pizza Express instead. We arrived just in time for the event, but there was a large protest outside, and a lot of excess nervousness. I thought the simplest way to deal with this was to talk to the demonstrators, and did so while garbed in dinner jacket and bow tie (most of them were for some reason more interested in discussing a Fire Brigade pay dispute then taking place, than the issue of free speech). Nobody so much as spat at me, or even shouted at me, though technically I was committing a grave offence in their eyes, by colluding in M. le Pen's right to speak.

I wasn't much surprised. Demonstrators against free speech seldom have any real idea of what they would do if they got hold of the person they wish to shut up, and are very rarely as nasty as the cause they support. I know this because I used to be one of them, and took part in a number of such demonstrations in my Trotskyist days. They are among the acts of which I am most ashamed, since their blatant purpose was to stop opponents from talking, which I have come to see as a very wicked thing indeed.

I remember a particular campaign against the late Professor Hans Eysenck (a refugee from the Nazis, as it happened), when I was at York, which - looked at now - is indefensibly ugly and wrong. I think it may even be the model for an event described in Malcolm Bradbury's interesting and bitter novel of sixties/early seventies campus life "The History Man". Though I may be being vain. I expect there were plenty of similar stupid actions going on, in the plate-glass campuses of the day, from which Bradbury could have drawn his model.

I had come firmly round to the opposite view by the time I came to be (with a sort of historic justice) on the receiving end of it a few years ago. I was debating (yes) drugs with Howard Marks, who turned out to be a real gentleman and for whom I have had a great liking ever since. For this is what happened.

We clashed cheerfully in front of a large fringe audience at a National Union of Students conference in Blackpool.

And then, when we were still hard at it, an official of the NUS marched on to the platform, switched off the microphones and ordered me from the stage. He refused to say why, but suggested pompously that I ought somehow to know how I had transgressed. A few heavily-pierced people in the audience began screaming abuse at me, one of them dancing just in front of me, jingling faintly as she yelled things I couldn't make out, though they clearly weren't declarations of love or admiration. Howard, outraged by the act of censorship and anxious (needlessly) for my safety, took my arm and said "Well, if he's going, I'm going too". And so we left the stage.

It turned out later that a wholly false account of what I had so far said had been circulated by a Marxist faction (they later withdrew it after some vigorous persuasion by me), that the NUS apparatus had believed it without checking with me, and that I had therefore been categorised as being one with Messrs Griffin, le Pen and Irving. The police, to my huge amusement, offered to escort me to Blackpool railway station, or to the town boundary (whichever I preferred) claiming to be afraid for my safety. In the end, a charming, cunning officer persuaded me to leave the Winter Gardens (much against my will) by a back door. He got me to do this by saying "Yes, I quite understand that you don't want to sneak out, but look at it from my point of view. I'm responsible if there's trouble here tonight, and there's an awful lot of glass in this building that could get broken if there were any trouble. So if you went out the front, and it did get broken, then the responsibility would be mine. So please, do me a favour and go out of the back door". And I did, though I still wish I hadn't.

I was never at any time afraid of the demonstrators, and begged repeatedly for the chance to speak to them, but the police just refused to let me do so.

It was the idea the demonstrators held that I was afraid of and am still afraid of. Once you start deciding what opinions people can hold, there's almost no end to the bad things you can do. It leads straight to the Thought Police, for if you can do it, so can your opponents.

Hitler (and I'd be grateful for anyone who can give me chapter and verse on this, because I've tried and failed to find the exact details) is supposed by some accounts to have made this very point at the moment he finally destroyed the last traces of freedom in Germany, during the passage of the Enabling Act through the Reichstag on 23rd March 1933. The Social Democrat Otto Wels had just made a courageous speech opposing the law, which would shortly snuff out his party. The Social Democrat deputies had turned up in impressive numbers to vote against it, despite being certain of defeat and despite the fact that many of their colleagues had already been dragged off to concentration camps and they risked arrest (or at least a severe beating) simply by appearing in the debating chamber. The Nazi deputies were in their Brownshirt uniforms and big boots, baying and snarling. After Wels sat down, Hitler rose and teased him with a quotation from Schiller: "Spaet kommt ihr, doch ihr kommt', which means roughly "You're late arriving, but you're here at last". Some accounts I have read say Hitler was referring to Wels's condemnation of the Nazi measures suppressing the democratic parties - though the Social Democrats had never protested against the Weimar Republic's measures (which failed) to suppress the Nazis. In other words, it's not much use complaining about being suppressed, now you're weak, when you yourself sought to suppress us when you were strong. If this is true, it is a pretty terrible warning never to set a precedent of this kind. Your enemies will always use it against you.

That's why I am so willing to come to the defence of anyone who gets into trouble for expressing an opinion, however foul. Firstly, such suppression will usually fail. Secondly, it sets a terrible precedent. I admit I’m sometimes reluctant to do this. It took me far too long to write about the 'Lyrical Terrorist', and I was shamed into doing so by others who go there first. It is difficult to say in public that someone who writes atrocious poems about beheading people should be allowed to do so. And yet she should be. We need to know what such people think, and to heap scorn on them for thinking it, and anything short of actual incitement to violence remains, and must remain, legal - or nobody is safe. I don't think people become terrorists, or commit terrorist acts, because they have listened to open arguments in places where those arguments might be rebutted. Though they might do so in secret cellars where, amid melodrama, banned opinions are whispered in conspiratorial tones.

As for David Irving and Nick Griffin, I've met Mr Griffin, and interviewed him, and think he's not as smart as he's made out to be. His hands visibly trembling as he talked, he crazily admitted to me that his party was tiny (3,724 members at that time), and that one of his BNP comrades was having him investigated for ...being Jewish. This elderly maniac saw Griffin's father on TV and thought his nose looked a bit Jewish. So he began to probe the Griffin family tree for evidence of Jewish blood. Left to their own devices, Mr Griffin and his party would be nowhere and nothing, a laughing stock of weirdoes, measuring each other's noses. But the crazed prosecution and trial mounted against him, which inevitably ended in his acquittal, must have hugely increased his standing, and every attempt to silence him allows him to don his gag and claim that the establishment won't let him speak, in which case people will think the establishment are hiding something. Let him speak at the Oxford Union? Why not? Have him on 'Desert Island Discs' and let Jonathan Ross interview him, for all I care. In the flesh, he's a silly, narrow-minded person with a very nasty little mini-party attached.

I've read some (not much) of David Irving's works and the sad thing is that he might have been a good historian if only things had turned out differently. A lot of respectable academics and journalists say that he has done original research that is quite valuable, in places where most of them have(quite reasonably)not much wanted to go. Now, by admitting that, do I give any kind of legitimacy to his loopy, pathetic falsehoods about the undoubted National Socialist massacre of the Jews? No. But if we prosecuted him, and banned his books, and refused to let him speak, might we not enlarge that little corner of society inhabited by the twisted, twitching fantasists who genuinely believe that the Holocaust is a myth, and that there is a vast conspiracy to deny the facts? Why be afraid of falsehood? Mock it, challenge it, tease it, but above all prove it wrong - something much easier done in the open light of day.

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22 November 2007 6:07 PM

Several responses: A question for those who repeatedly raise the fake parallel of illegal drugs and legal alcohol, and never, never answer my riposte to it though claiming to be unconvinced by that riposte. A small hint.

If you say you're unconvinced by an argument without explaining why, you're not playing according to the rules of this site, where proper argument is expected. Yes, that's you I'm talking about , "May du P'naim".

If you will not say why, then I'll have to assume that you don't have an answer, and are pig-headedly sticking to your position although you cannot reason in its defence. One, I am campaigning for the proper enforcement of an existing law. You appear to be campaigning either for its non-enforcement, or for its abolition. When you therefore claim to be so concerned about alcohol abuse, what is it that you propose?

That the laws against alcohol should be as strict as those against, say, heroin, and as strictly enforced as I would like them to be? No. You are really campaigning for the laws against narcotics to be as lax as the ones on alcohol. I suspect you don't actually care in the slightest what the alcohol laws are.

Your argument is wholly destructive, while appearing to be motivated by concern. In which case your argument is a hypocritical fake. You imply that, because we have failed to control alcohol, we should give up trying to control drugs. But you cover this up with a pretence that you are genuinely concerned about alcohol.

In fact, your attitude will ensure that both scourges are unleashed, unhindered, across society. Your argument is not merely inconsistent and wrong. It is actively fraudulent and designed to give the impression that you are concerned for others when you are in fact concerned only for yourselves, and your greasy pleasures.

By the way, I don't believe the argument that cannabis is a 'gateway' drug has been made here, and it certainly hasn't been deployed by me. I'm not convinced by it, and don't regard it as an important part of the debate.

My view is that cannabis is quite dangerous and nasty enough by itself. It may well be that its users move on to other drugs, though some doctors now reckon that the irreversible brain damage inflicted by cannabis is more terrifying than the often-reversible physical ravages of heroin and cocaine.

As for the assertion by "May" (I'm sorry if this is a real name. It just doesn't sound like one, hence the inverted commas) that "the majority of young people will be far [more] likely to first learn about the moral acceptability of drugtaking from the adults they see getting drunk around them.", I think this is dubious.

First, I doubt very much whether the middle-class teens who use cannabis have parents who get drunk, though I suspect that rather a lot of them have parents who either are or were cannabis users themselves. Secondly, the crucial step in taking an illegal drug is not the taking of the drug (cannabis is always taken to get high, alcohol can be drunk purely for taste or sociability) , but the decision to break the law by making the illicit purchase.

This is learned from a culture of public figures, commentators, teachers, adults, movie stars, celebs, etc, who openly take illegal drugs - and a culture of law-enforcement bodies which equally openly do nothing. Not, I think, from parents who have a few glasses of legal wine with their supper.

Alex Owen wonders why a law against the possession of illegal drugs should apply on private property. This is an interesting attitude to the law, apparently based on property and the market rather than on Christianity.

Well, it should apply there for the same reason that all other laws apply on private property. You can't get away with murder, assault, rape, robbery or fraud because you did it on your own land.

So why should you be allowed to possess a substance which has been ruled illegal by Parliament?

The importance of possession being a crime is simple. It is the only way in which the actual user can be prosecuted and punished. The apologists for the absurd 'war on drugs' (and several misguided readers of this blog) concentrate on the so-called 'evil dealers', who would not exist if there were no demand, and who laugh at the efforts of the authorities. What is the source of that demand?

Well, at least partly, powerful commercial advertising, and partly human weakness and folly, as in the case of most harmful products used on a large scale. Drugs have for decades had an active and persuasive advertising campaign, known as the rock music industry, and the endorsement of large numbers of celebrities, together with the near-endorsement of those who argue spuriously for their legalisation. Fear of punishment is the only serious counterweight to this in the minds of the impressionable ( and that's quite a lot of people). And that fear must apply everywhere to be effective.

Social and moral conservatism is not Tory anarchism. Likewise I am not an 'anti-statist', as the Adrian Mole Brothers have absurdly claimed. The state is necessary in any advanced society. The question is, how large and extensive and powerful it needs to be.

Also I seem to have spotted someone pointing out that Thatcherism may have played some role in the spread of drugs, as if this would somehow derail my argument. Are there still people out there who don't know I'm not a Thatcherite? Well, I'm not. And one reason is that I think the destruction of industrial employment for male breadwinners under the Thatcher government was a social as well as an economic mistake, and I am well aware of the heavy drug use in de-industrialised areas.

"Grant" mentions the famous period when heroin was available legally on prescription in this country. Well, so it was, and this arrangement was ended because some doctors abused it. But that was also an entirely different era in this country, before the rock industry had begun its relentless publicity campaign for drugs, and before the general collapse of parental and teacher authority and of the criminal justice system. It was also at a time when the use of heroin was universally regarded with horror and disgust, rather than romanticised and excused as it is now.

Grant adds "the evidence is that if the state provides them for nothing it reduces the number of addicts and the amount of crime committed by them.". To which I reply, where is this evidence, exactly? Please direct me to it, with full references. I should be interested to examine its figures and its methodology.

It would seem to me much more likely that if the taxpayer were to be forced to supply free heroin (advertised widely as it is) to every degenerate who chooses to poison himself in this way, the numbers of heroin abusers will increase exponentially as the word gets round. I imagine most of these people will also receive allowances for being incapacitated, even though they have incapacitated themselves.

Further, Grant argues "anyone who takes heroin is making a choice to inject something into their own body. What right do you have to send them to prison for this? You mention anti-social behaviour, but any anti-social behaviour caused by heroin is dwarfed by that caused by alcohol."

Well, I've repeatedly dealt with the alcohol red herring (see above), and await reasoned replies from 'Grant' or 'May' to what I've said. If 'Grant' gets his way, it won't be long before heroin is causing as much crime as booze. Anyway, I don't happen to think that people own themselves. As 'Grant' appositely asks "What do you say to the parents of addicts?". He suggests that those parents would prefer their children to inject themselves with poisonous muck in a clean environment.

Well, I don't think so. Given the choice, I am sure they want their children back from the drug culture altogether. They want them to stop, not to be helped to continue, in clean surroundings, to ruin their lives . Defeatists and appeasers may have helped fool them into the belief that it is hard to give up heroin. But once the untruth of this proposition is made clear, I am sure they would prefer total cessation.

Drugtakers, indeed all of us, owe debts to others, not least those who raised them and those who rely on them. My own view is that they also owe a duty to God, but I know this is baffling to some, so I simply mention it as a possibility to be considered seriously. By harming themselves in this way, they have multiple effects on others. They cruelly grieve anyone who loves them, almost beyond bearing. They become so arrogantly selfish in pursuit of their pleasure that they steal, very often from those closest to them, which is a specially hurtful form of crime.

And they believe that their 'habit' (which they could control but won't) excuses this stealing. A law which punishes possession severely, and so deters them from starting in the first place, is the best hope they have. It assumes that they are proper men and women with free will, rather than feeble creatures with none, and therefore helps them, become proper men and women(whereas the appeasement policy helps them to become and remain slaves). Applied in an exemplary fashion, a punitive, deterrent policy would save countless lives from ruin. Drugtaking is not a private act, any more than any man is an island, entire of himself.

Which brings me neatly to 'Steve B' , who chides me for lack of Christian charity, saying:. "Goodwill to all men, love thy neighbour etc - except those souls ravaged by heroin addiction who should be flayed alive and kept out of my sight, thank you very much." And "It is my contention that human beings - yes, even ones who have repeatedly broken the law and made a choice to use an illegal poison - should not simply be flung aside out of our comfy suburban sights to rot." Something similar comes form Nisa Tanin, though more temperately: "Describing these people with broken lives and minds as mere junkies to spit on and to isolate is only a denial of their existence in the far fringes of society. Although you make some valid points I am left slightly disturbed by the tone and attitude of utter contempt in your article and believe that some compassion would not go amiss. Not every 'junky' is a monster. Many of them have got to where they are through terrible events in their lives"

Well, first of all nobody has talked about flaying, rotting, spitting on or flinging aside. As for being out of sight, or isolated, the sort of sentences I envisage would have the ex-junkies back on the streets quite quickly, not least so that they could spread the word of how very unpleasant it was to be inside. Prisons in my view should be places of austere discipline, loss of status and privilege, removal of comfort and distraction, and plentiful hard work, and also of short sentences fully served. But they should not be places of neglect, abuse or cruelty, and are actually less likely to be abusive or cruel or neglectful if they are run as I suggest than if they are run as they are now.

You have a strange idea of Christianity (excusable, I suppose, if all you have seen is ranks of sweet old ladies singing hymns in 'Songs of Praise', and have had no education in the Scriptures). Christ was very tender to repentant sinners, but very hard on the unrepentant ones, who face weeping, gnashing of teeth and outer darkness in a large number of parables.

The deliberate throwing away of your own life by the taking of drugs is plainly, in Christian terms, wrong. It is a form of suicide, and the crimes which drugtakers commit against others, in the pursuit of their selfish pleasure, are also deeply wrong under all known moral codes. The Christian wishes to help people to stop behaving in this way.

And the question here is, who is really helping these people?

The ones who indulge the heroin taker, who cheerfully supply him with what is in effect a slow-motion suicide kit, who assist him in his false belief that he has no choice, who treat him as if he is a weakling who cannot cope without a drug, who accept his feeble, nonsequitur excuses for his state? (Many people undergo terrible experiences. Most do not respond by becoming heroin users. Therefore the excuse that a heroin user has undergone terrible experiences is not valid, any more than the excuse that someone is poor is not a valid one for acts of theft). Or those who say"Do this, and you will be punished so hard that you will never want to do it again"?

Obviously, to make this work, you would need to have a period during which exemplary punishment was convincingly meted out. But I do not expect it would last very long before the message got through, and drug abuse fell. Our society has for years adopted the first course of action. What has happened? The number of drug abusers has visibly grown and grown. This would seem to me to suggest that,if you seriously want to help people not take drugs, sympathy is the last thing you should deploy.

A similar realisation now grips those charities which deal with the misnamed 'homeless', whose problems are not lack of housing but lack of stable families and fathers. These charities now spend much effort rightly urging us not to give these people money, which will only be spent on drugs and drink, but to give it instead to the charities, who will try to get them off the streets.

So the Christian may have to pass by the beggar and refuse to give to him, if he truly wishes to help him. It may look unChristian to do so. But I don't think it is. Likewise, I have no doubt that the threat of severe punishment would save many young lives from ruin by drugs of all kind, and long for this to be tried before more of those lives are wrecked.

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20 November 2007 9:54 AM

My headline for this article is taken from the BBC website, which uses precisely this phrase to trumpet its account of a scheme to give heroin 'addicts' free supplies of their illegal drug at the expense of honest, law-abiding, hard-working people. This is, in part, a replacement of the utterly useless and positively harmful Methadone programme, the state's previous exercise in total moral vacuity and feebleness in the face of the drug menace. Don't let that blind you to how nasty this development is in its own right.

The story was featured triumphally on Monday's 'Today' programme on BBC Radio 4, and - while I was listening - there wasn't a critical voice to be heard. It was even said that it would be 'funded' by the Home Office and the Health Department, the usual BBC misunderstanding of where the state's money comes from. Actually it is paid for by you and me, and - if we don't stop it - there will be more and more of this, gobbling up piles of our money on subsidising sloth and self-inflicted harm.

May I digress a moment here? I see that there is to be a sort of study of BBC impartiality by the BBC Trust. But it will look at network coverage during elections. This misses the point so completely it is hard to know what to say. Nobody has ever seriously accused the BBC of open bias towards one party or the other at election time. Elections are the one time when the BBC attempts to be wholly fair. The real BBC bias is in favour of the sexual revolution and against Christian morality, in favour of the permissive society in general, in favour of the EU, in favour of 'progressive' education policies, in favour of the relaxation of taboos, and of the breakdown of the rules of language. A recent example: on Monday a newsreader spoke in lovely Received Pronunciation tones of how Gordon Brown was about to 'commit to' something. This wasn't a mistake, but repeated an hour later. For anyone of my generation this was an ugly and illiterate misuse of a word. The verb 'commit', when linked to the preposition ‘to’ is reflexive and must be used with a reflexive pronoun. Without the preposition, in its non-reflexive form, it is used only for rather ugly purposes, to commit a crime, murder or suicide. Why should this change? Is the new form easier on the ear? Easier to understand? Or just lazy, sloppy, ugly and unnecessary, and just the sort of thing a high-standard national broadcaster should be committed to avoid (note, not 'should commit to')? Who or what is Mr Brown 'committing to' his goal? Shouldn't we know? Is it himself? Is it us, is it his wretched party? Is it just a lot of our money? The new form is less clear, less truthful than the old. Perhaps that is why it is becoming part of New Labour Newspeak.

These moral and cultural divisions are not party issues, though for a while a segment of the Tory Party was associated with morally, socially and linguistically conservative ideas, and - as a direct result - the BBC treated the Tory Party as if it were a convicted criminal. Now the Tories have purged themselves of all trace of socially and morally conservative thought, they are treated incredibly fairly by the BBC. The change is so huge, it is shocking. In fact I regard it as news. BBC bulletins are crammed with generous, uncritical coverage of Cameron initiatives which, under another leader and three years ago, would have been ignored or mentioned only in the context of Labour's denunciation of them. This former link between the Tories and conservatism, now quite gone, is the reason why some people think the BBC bias is specifically anti-Tory.

But back to the illegal drugs, freely distributed to their illegal users by the state, using money extracted from you and me on pain of imprisonment. Plenty of paradoxes there, I should have thought. What has been going on, in London, Darlington and Brighton, is that users of the illegal drug Heroin have been given free supplies of this poison (which we officially loathe so much that we pretend we want to wipe out the Poppy fields of Afghanistan) by special state clinics, "under the supervision of a dedicated team of nurses and clinicians in a special but simply furnished room". They're open every day, too, which is more than can be said for quite a lot of police stations or GP surgeries.

I'm glad it's "simply furnished", aren't you? It would be so much harder to bear if the place were done out in heavy carved mahogany and rich carpets. All "addicts" must wash their hands" before taking their heroin. How nice. There are cupboards for 'storage', presumably a place for the junkies to keep their "equipment". Are they required to keep that clean, too? It isn't stated.

"Compared with the kinds of places where some addicts take their drugs", trills the BBC website "this is a different, clinical world".Well, I should think it would be, given what we have spent on making it so. But why should it exist at all? So far as I understand it, the possession and sale of Heroin is against the law. So why is it legal for the state to give it to these self-confirmed criminals? I am particularly struck by this because, a few years ago, a relative of mine was dying in some pain in an NHS hospital. Doctors were initially reluctant to give her enough morphine (the same thing as Heroin) for fear that she might become addicted. The idea that this devout Edwardian Christian, a dedicated lifelong nurse who accompanied the allied armies through Europe after D-Day, would become addicted to morphine in her final days was beyond laughable. But it was seriously advanced.

Yet, when these self-destructive morons are involved, a smiling official, no doubt addressing them all matily by their Christian names and asking them how they are, hands them a whopping dose of a drug they take for pleasure, without any fuss at all.

Several of these parasites are quoted, approving warmly of the scheme (and why shouldn't they?).”Christine" says her days on 'street drugs' were fraught with risk. "You got to go to places, certain housing estates and certain areas that are not exactly nice places to go", she recalls - and just think how bad they must have been for a junkie to think they weren't nice. I wonder what the inhabitants of these parts of town thought of Christine, as she loomed gauntly among the lamp-posts, looking for her fix? Imagine the charming domestic scene as the children observe her progress: "Mum, mum, that junkie's hanging around the bus shelter again!”

"You are at risk of being mugged", she goes on "or being sold rubbish by other addicts". Well, I never, what a shock, and nobody ever warned you that taking heroin was a bad idea, did they, Christine? No doubt she herself was never guilty of stealing or defrauding her fellow junkies, but it is quite common among such people, isn't it? By the way, can we dispense with this term "stealing to feed their habit", (which crops up predictably in the BBC report, as if a 'drug habit' were a large and demanding pet that would eat you alive if you didn't feed it, rather than a chosen path in life)? The words imply that in some way a drug habit, though chosen by the drug taker, excuses or explains the filthy act of theft, or that it is compulsive and beyond control. Can we substitute "he (or she) was so determined to enjoy his (or her) selfish drug that he (or she) stole money from weak and vulnerable people, to pay for it"?

Another of these victims of his own stupid selfishness, "Gary", managed to infect himself with Hepatitis C while pumping Heroin into his bloodstream. Again, what a surprise that must have been, when the diagnosis came through. There have been quite a lot of warnings about this. You might as well complain that you bleed after cutting yourself. Having been cured of this self-inflicted disease, no doubt at enormous expense by the NHS, "Gary" whines that his treatment was conditional on him joining the scheme, one of the few reassuring facts in this mass of folly and weakness.

He has the nerve to complain: “Just because I am addicted to one of the most addictive substances on the planet am I to be written off as a human being and not get any respect from the Health Service?" Diddums, "Gary". What would you say to someone who repeatedly drove his car into the sides of buildings at speed, and was told that, unless he changed his ways, the NHS would stop patching him up afterwards? I've argued elsewhere that Heroin is a lot easier to get off than is generally believed. But even if you don't agree with me about that, you have to admit that you don't just 'catch' a heroin habit by being on the same bus as an 'addict', do you? You have to seek out the nasty people who sell it, often themselves very bad advertisements for the druggy lifestyle, you have to buy the gruesome paraphernalia with which to force it into your bloodstream, you then have to go through a number of rather repellent procedures. And then you have to do it again and again and again before you can be sure you're a properly habitual user. And all the time, you know that it is wrong, and against the law. Forgive me if I haven't any sympathy left to spare for you, what with all the other bad things going on in the world, where people are miserable and ill through no fault of their own.

Or do you really know that it's wrong and illegal? That's the trouble, isn't it? Rock stars get away with it. They even promote it in their songs. Celebs get away with it. Fashionable authors and journalists get away with it. And the law is not enforced, and then you find that on top of all that, the dear old taxpayer is actually providing it for you free, in a clean but "simply furnished" room with a nice cupboard where you can keep your needle, your spoon and your tourniquet. So you conclude, quite reasonably, that they don't really mean that stuff about it being illegal at all.

This scheme will, in the end, result in more people taking heroin, not less. That is why it should be scrapped, now. The proper place for people who possess heroin is prison, the proper cure, punishment so bad they won't want to come back, and hard, hard work. This is the 'war against drugs' that has never been tried. I hate to think how many lives have already been ruined (and I am thinking of the relatives and victims of drug takers, just as much of the users themselves) because we haven't the moral guts to fight it.

13 November 2007 9:14 AM

Actually I don't think that Jonathan Aitken or Jeffrey Archer should have gone to prison, though both should certainly have been disgraced for their lies in court.

Perjury in civil cases rarely if ever leads to jail, and it has always been my view that these two went to jail as part of a general Blairite frenzy, in which the criminal justice system sought to show that it was as New Labour as everyone else.

Oddly enough, though I think Jeffrey Archer in general a laughable figure, I have some sympathy for the way he has behaved since he was imprisoned.

His books on his experiences are interesting and informative for anyone who is paying attention, and I think he was treated spitefully and exceptionally by the authorities when they put him back into a closed prison.

As for Jonathan Aitken, I am of course delighted at his repentance, but if he really is so awfully penitent, shouldn't he be more inclined to shut up about it?

He hasn't exactly gone into a Profumo-like purdah ( *some of you may not know that John Profumo, who shared the favours of the call girl Christine Keeler with a Soviet Diplomat while he was a junior defence minister in the 1960s, and lied to the Commons about it, then vanished into London's east End for 40 years, doing quiet good works and keeping his mouth shut).

In fact Mr Aitken is the most glamorous, jolly penitent I think I have ever come across.

And now he has accepted an unpaid job with the Tory Party, advising them about prisons.

In one way, this delights me. I think the Tories are amazingly inept, to remind those who had forgotten, and tell those who never knew, about Jonathan Aitken's mysterious libel suit and its wretched outcome.

I trust it will slow down their alleged resurgence, not that I think their vote is in reality anything near what the polls pretend. I should be interested to see it tested at a by-election.

But even more damaging is the idea that the reform of the prisons should be, or can be, accomplished thanks to the views or reminiscences of a former middle-class prisoner.

Much of the mess in our prisons today is thanks to reforms demanded after middle class suffragettes and pacifists were locked up in prison in the first two decades of the 20th century.

The resulting reforms created jails better suited for Bertrand Russell and Christabel Pankhurst, but much too nice for the Kray brothers.

The key thing about our prisons is not the effect that they have on those who are sent to them. It is the effect they have on the vast majority who are not sent to them.

This is twofold. Do they protect the unharmful and the law-abiding from crime and disorder? Do they deter those who might consider breaking the law, by spreading fear of what will happen to them if they do? No, and no.

For far too long, British political and social reformers have looked at prisons from the point of view of the inmate. This is largely pointless.

Prisons these days mostly contain people who are already pretty incorrigible by the time they get there (I should add here that there is also a fair leavening of pitiful incompetents, too dim to outwit even our modern police, and , tragically, the mentally ill abandoned by 'Care in the Community'. But these are not the concern of this article).

It is far harder to get into a British prison than it is to get into most British universities.

The typical British criminal (unless he is a retired vicar refusing to pay his council tax, or she is a victim of crime and intimidation desperately defending herself when the police have failed to do so) must try, and try and try again to persuade a reluctant police to stop giving him cautions, a reluctant CPS to prosecute him if the police want him prosecuted, and then to persuade reluctant judges and magistrates actually to send him there.

If there had ever been any chance of 'rehabilitation', then it will have been missed long, long before he finally collects his prison track-suit bottoms at the reception desk in Wormwood Scrubs.

And the impression I have gained from my own visit to Wormwood Scrubs a few years ago, and from conversations and correspondence with prison warders ( as well as a careful reading if reports on such prisons as Wymott, in Lancashire) is that the prisons are now largely in the hands of the inmates.

The officers, in my view, do a surprisingly good job in trying to prevent our prisons from turning into absolute hell-holes. But they simply lack the authority to do the job they ought to be doing.

This means that a violent, ruthless person, given to drug-taking, will cope perfectly well in prison, where he will find the informal rules of behaviour favour him.

Prison, on the other hand, is often a place of terror and misery for the gentle and non-violent, and for those who do not have the support of a gang or other group.

Heaven help the wrongly convicted in such places.

This is even worse in the penitentiaries of the USA,where there is far less protection for the weak against the strong.

So, for those who most need to be punished, prison is not a place of punishment at all.

The regime has been softened to such an extent that career criminals view occasional periods of imprisonment as necessary hazards of the job, to be cheerfully borne.

In some cases, according to the retired Prison doctor Theodore Dalrymple, petty criminals and drug addicts actually welcome their spells in prison as a time when they are looked after.

Thus 'rehabilitation', always a fanciful idea when applied to adults with formed characters, is even more unlikely than it might appear.

The best we can hope for is that the evildoers get older and eventually give up because they aren't strong enough any more.

What's more, word gets out among those who are potential criminals, that this is what awaits them if they eventually rack up enough cautions and unpaid fines and suspended sentences to qualify for an actual spell inside… And it does not deter them.

Do not mistake this for a claim that prisons are 'holiday camps' or 'hotels'. That is silly language, exaggerated and untrue.

The real problem is that they are not really anything.

The American expression 'warehousing' is the most accurate. They have no moral force, no confidence in the rightness of their objective (if they have one at all), no belief that their inmates have done evil things for which they need to do penance.

They claim to be a form of mental hospital, in which troubled 'offenders' are set on the straight and narrow. But they have no medicines, real or metaphorical, to achieve this. In any case, they don't really believe in the straight and narrow.

Nobody is sentenced these days until 'reports' on his circumstances have been prepared. So his crimes are explained, and partly excused, by his background.

There is no true withdrawal of normal life. There is TV, there are games, gyms, a choice of food, undemanding work - and there are drugs, which circulate unchecked throughout most of the system.

There are few punishments, and these are harder and harder to inflict under Human Rights laws. Sentences are automatically halved, so remission does not need to be earned.

The effect on those who obey the law out of duty is not hard to find. We are abandoned.

If you doubt this, then explain this week's admission by the police that two million crimes a year (40% of crimes) now go uninvestigated, because there are too many of them.

There are too many of them because, for far too long, we have had a cardboard criminal justice system that frightens nobody.

A general realisation among the nasty that they will not be seriously punished for crimes or evil actions increases the numbers of the nasty and the number of crimes they commit, until a police force ten million strong couldn't cope.

That is where we are.

The last thing we need is even nicer prisons, designed with the aid of an Old Etonian former Tory Cabinet Minister.

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Especially in politics, the word 'rape' has become very dangerous and unclear.

I suspect that in most people's minds, it means a violent sexual assault by a total stranger, clearly a hideous crime so foul that the harshest deterrent punishment is required.

But the thing now prosecuted as 'rape' is often nothing like so clear cut.

Now, let me say to start with that I think it a low and immoral act for a man to take advantage of a drunken woman.

It is a breach of trust and honour and it ought to be punished. I do not think that the fact that a woman has drunk too much excuses a man who then has intercourse with her.

But is this always rape, for instance where the two are well-known to each other and have been in a sustained sexual relationship for some time?

For our criminal justice system has very special rules for rape cases, yet another case of unintended consequences and good intentions gone astray.

The accuser is anonymous. The accused is not. The accuser's anonymity is not waived, even if her case fails lamentably.

Yet no man's reputation will ever recover from a public trial in which he is accused of rape, even if he is acquitted.

I know why these provisions were introduced, just as I know why it is increasingly difficult for the defence to cross-examine a woman who has accused a man of rape.

In effect, the presumption of innocence is laid to one side. And as a result it is entirely possible, and legally risk-free, for there to be a malicious prosecution against a man by a woman.

A lot of this is the result of the collapse of older courtship rituals and rules, and above all the collapse of the view that sex ought to take place only inside marriage.

Those rules, which the sixties generation thought it had outgrown, existed for many very good reasons.

One of those reasons was that, without that protection, women became vulnerable to the events now often depicted as 'rapes' which are in fact not rapes at all - many of which involve men and women who have been engaged in a sexual relationship for some time, or men and women who are, to put it mildly, not specially chaste in their personal lives.

I tend to think that people are having it both ways here.

David Cameron says he wants more convictions in this kind of case. There are several ways in which this might be achieved.

Abolishing Jury trial would be one, since it is level-headed juries who often refuse to despatch a man to prison for several years on evidence that cannot, by its nature, be corroborated.

Does Mr Cameron wish to knock away this prop of our liberty, so as to please political correctness? I hope not.

In which case, let me suggest a couple of other possibilities.

One, the introduction of a lesser offence of 'second-degree rape' attracting much lower sentences, with which men could be charged.

Two, the abolition of the accuser's anonymity, which is an offence against justice anyway, and which would surely deter frivolous or malicious prosecutions.

Third, of course, a serious attempt to create the conditions in which lifelong marriage could once again be encouraged to flourish, and the nasty era of sexual licence, which is the real cause of most of this misery could be brought to a welcome end.

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The BBC's Panorama programme on Monday accepted - as most media
outlets still do - that the non-existent complaint 'ADHD' does actually exist.

Well, I don't mind, on this occasion. Because what it found was
that the horrible drugs which 'ADHD' advocates want to give to affected
children don't actually work. And, what's more, they are associated with
stunted growth.

Now, if the 'ADHD' lobby were right about the complaint, and
therefore right about the treatment for it, then it seems to me that long-term
study would show that the drugs did work.

To the zealots who write me intemperate letters whenever I
criticise this unscientific, nasty rubbish, may I suggest that you enter into
(polite) correspondence with Professor William Pelham, of the University of
Buffalo , who (after studying 600 children 'diagnosed' with 'ADHD' since the
1990s) is quoted as saying: "They weren't growing as much as other kids
both in terms of their height and their weight.

"There were no beneficial effects - none. In the short run
medication will help the child behave better, in the long run it won't.

"That information should be made
very clear to parents."

My own view is that the 'better'
behaviour attributed to the children in the short run is actually a greater
ability to perform dull, repetitive schoolwork, an effect that such drugs would
achieve in anyone.

Amphetamines, to which anti-ADHD drugs
are very similar, have often been used by students cramming for exams, to
increase concentration and endurance.

And remember, there is still no
objective physical or chemical diagnosis of this alleged complaint.

Yet the treatment most frequently
prescribed is a potent psychotropic drug whose long-term effects are still
mysterious - but which is now associated with stunted growth.

Can this possibly be right?

By the way, talking about the drugging of the young, I have
repeatedly seen it suggested that Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the schoolboy who
murdered eight schoolfellows in

Finland

,
was taking anti-depressant drugs before he committed his crime.

So far, police have refused to comment.

Since I now know that this blog has readers in Finland, I would be
glad if anyone can tell me if this suggestion has been confirmed or denied,
since such drugs have been taken by so many of the people responsible for such
shootings.

It might make a more useful line of investigation and action than
the usual witless anti-gun frenzy.

06 November 2007 6:12 PM

This
is about what a clever colleague of mine described as 'Mumbai Jumbo’,
the way in which British people absurdly and selectively accept the
renaming of foreign cities because they think it is politically
correct. The two most prominent examples are the way we have all
(except me, of course) stopped saying 'Peking' and started saying
'Beijing' , and the way we have substituted 'Mumbai' for 'Bombay'.

Let's
deal first of all with ‘Beijing’. Yes, this is the real Chinese name of
the country's capital. (And the Chinese don't call their country
'China'. they call it 'Zhongguo'). It always has been. But then again,
the capital of Russia (or 'Rassiya' as its people know it) has always
been Moskva (pronounce it 'Maaskva'). The lovely chief city of the
Czech Republic is actually called 'Praha' by its citizens. The country
you think of as 'Hungary' believes it is called 'Magyarorszag'.

The
chilly capital of Finland ('Suomi', since you ask) is not Helsinki but
'Helsingfors' . If you want to be fussy, the capital of France should
be pronounced ‘Paree’. On the 'Beijing rather than Peking' principle,
the book and film of 'The Third man' take place in ‘Wien’. A lot of
mildly adventurous people these days take Mediterranean holidays in a
country which thinks it is called 'Hrvatska'.

But mostly they don't
know that, and couldn't pronounce it if they did. And I doubt if many
of those who head off for stag parties in 'Baile Atha Cliath' are aware
of the official name of the city they pollute with their puking and
yelling. They also have no idea that Hong Kong is really called 'Yang
Kang'. But I bet they all slavishly call Peking 'Beijing'.

My
view is that it's a cultural cringe to a newly powerful China. But most
other European countries don't do it (check the headlines of their
newspapers next time you're in Wien, Warszawa, Anvers, Nuernberg ,
Muenchen, Kobenhavn, Firenze, or absolutely anywhere in Sverige, Norge
or Espana, ) , and I really don't see why we should. And are you really
offended that Poles call London 'Londyn', that the Italians call it
'Londra' and the French call it 'Londres'? On the contrary, it's a
compliment, that your capital is famous enough to merit its own name in
the great languages of the world.

As for 'Mumbai', Indian
friends of mine are specially vexed by this. The name-change is in fact
the idea of a very nasty Hindu nationalist party, famed for its
intolerance and for its leader's admiration for Hitler. It is much
disliked by many of the city's own people, who appreciate living in a
place so famous that it has a world-famous name. In Bombay itself, you
can still find the Bombay edition of the Times of India, the Bombay
High Court and of course Bombay Central Railway station, from which a
splendid sleeper express will take you to Delhi, across hundreds of
miles of Bharat (which is what Indians call India).

Then
again, there's Cambodia, which is really called 'Kampuchea', but which
prefers not to be known by that name just now, because it was the one
favoured by the hated mass murderers of the Khmer Rouge. A bit of a
problem for the PC movement, that one.

All or nothing, if you
ask me. If you call Paris 'Paris' rather than 'Paree', then you really
have to say 'Peking' and 'Bombay'. If you say 'Beijing' and 'Mumbai'
then you really have to say 'Paree' . And if you call Paris 'Paree'
rather than 'Paris', then you strike me as being a bit of a twit.

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Two weeks ago I tried to do something which my many detractors would assume I was incapable of doing, given that I am, as is well known, an unhinged spittle-flecked extremist. That is, I sought a compromise between my own position and that of those who disagree with me. I tried to interest defenders of abortion in a political armistice for a good purpose, aimed at helping to achieve a reform which would - in my view - reduce the instance of a major evil. I hoped to do this in a way which might be acceptable to those who, on principle, regard abortion as a procedure which ought to be available under some circumstances. That is, rather than embarking on a restatement of the classic anti-abortion view, I assumed that my opponents were a) broadly familiar with it and b) unmoved by it in every sense of the word. I also aired the widely-unknown fact that abortion was in fact legal in Britain before 1967, and gave a broadly sympathetic view of the case of Dr Aleck Bourne, who in 1938 aborted a 14-year-old gang rape victim - even though my own moral position is (reluctantly) unable to accept abortion as right even under these terrible circumstances.

What followed was yet another proof of Jonathan Swift's warning that reason plays a very small role in politics, because you cannot reason anyone out of a position he hasn't been reasoned into in the first place. Most correspondents didn't even notice what was going on, and chose to use the thread as a weary restatement of what we already know. One, rather enjoyably, took the following passage "Does that mean that sex education increases unwanted pregnancy and STDs? I am not sure." as a dogmatic statement of certainty that sex education is the undoubted cause of this increase. I long for research to be done on this, but it hasn't been. For instance, almost identical sex-education programmes in Denmark and the Netherlands have had utterly different outcomes, probably because of the sharply different moral climates in those countries. Some did notice what I was up to, but alas they only chided me furiously for weakness in face of the enemy, in one case making fantastically sectarian remarks about the Church of England, of which I am a dissident member who has as yet not been hunted down and driven out by the authorities. On this blog, the harshest criticisms of the C of E are supposed to come from me, thanks very much.

So I am going to try again.

At the heart of my argument was a tentative acceptance that part of the pro-abortion case was powerful. That is to say, it is all very well being against something, but if the effect of your opposition is to make the thing you abhor more common, or more dangerous and equally common, or at least not to reduce it, then your 'opposition' is ineffectual and may actually have the opposite effect of the one intended.

It is much like intervening in, say, Iraq, to bring about democracy. It may make you feel good to do so, but if the actual result is not what you intended, but a violent, chaotic mixture of dictatorship and anarchy, the moral force of your position is , well, weakened and you should reconsider it.

Likewise, if an absolute ban on abortion results in a continuing high level of abortion, often conducted under dangerous and insanitary conditions, then this is an example of a moral position taken to make the holder of the opinion feel good, rather than actually to do good. This is exactly what liberals do - judge the person's moral standing by the purity of the opinions he holds, rather than by the effect of his actions.

Let me repeat what I said:"Perhaps, if the NHS had been permitted and encouraged to offer the same limited service as private doctors then provided, more readily and universally, free of charge, but under close restrictions which could land the doctor in court if he took them too laxly, the inequality could have been removed without signalling to the world that abortion would henceforth be a backstop form of contraception. For this is, without doubt, what it has become."

If anyone actually took up this point, or discussed it, then I seem to have missed it. Some people made tart remarks about Hillary Clinton being unlovely. Well, so what? You think I don't know? I lived in the USA during her co-presidency. But you don't have to approve of someone to quote them, if they have said something important or interesting. (Or in this case, deeply but unconsciously contradictory). One even complained that I mentioned her at all, apparently in the belief that it is wrong to mention American politicians in a British context. But no British politician, to my knowledge, has made this statement. The issue bubbles below the political surface here, above it in the USA. I was simply quoting her because she typified a certain position, not because I approved of her or even necessarily believed her, but because that's what she said.

William Russ made my blood run cold with his suggestion that our species is in some way 'advancing' (how can you tell the difference between forwards and backwards with any certainty, by the way?) and that abortion is an essential part of this.

I thought this sort of “higher good" tripe was discredited when the Edwardian eugenicists discovered that their arguments had been used in a terrifying way by the German National Socialists. I also thought that the belief in human 'progress' had taken a general pasting during the 20th century. But perhaps as we lose knowledge of our history, we need to have all these arguments again. Mr Russ should Google "Pirna" and "Action T4” and "Schloss Sonnenstein" and see what he finds. I don't mean to be unkind, and I am sure Mr Russ is as appalled by this sort of thing, in its ugly practice, as any other decent person. People often don't see the implications of the phrases they use, until they hear them repeated in the mouths of ruffians. That's what happened to the Edwardian idealists. Those who look up this episode might also be interested to see exactly who stood up against evil in this case (For those who haven't time to look: Roman Catholics and aristocrats, mainly, with a more muted intervention by some Protestants and doctors, though any protests, public or private, under that regime involved giant courage) . Some contributors were rightly disturbed by this and urged Mr Russ to do some other reading, and I very much hope he follows their suggestions.

There was a long and learned discussion about the moment at which life begins, which illustrates that, in all matters of faith, you believe that which you choose to believe, and do not find out if you are right this side of the grave. There was also some useful debate about the way in which those who seek to destroy people are careful to dehumanise their victims in advance. I'd like some pro-abortionists to acknowledge this and accept that rational people might view an abortion as the killing of a human person, and abandon their use of terms such as 'foetus' or 'clump of cells'. But it is easy to see why they don't. This is also standard stuff, which leaves both sides glowering at each other but with no lives saved.

I have still not puzzled out what Susan Phanar is talking about. A concern for endangered species, or for the conservation of forests (both good conservative causes hijacked and perverted by green socialists) is quite compatible with a concern for endangered unborn babies. Whereas it strikes me that anyone prepared to sacrifice unborn babies for a higher good might take the same view of elephants or orang-utans. As for the 'feminist' argument for abortion which she appears to take for granted, it has always seemed to be that the people most liberated by easy abortion were and are irresponsible men. Having got a woman pregnant, they can brush off any pressure to marry the woman or support the child, by pointing out that abortion is readily available on demand. These days, they don't even have to pay for it.

Steven Armstrong quoted from the Bible. Well, thank you. I like to think that at least some parts of this great library have the power to unsettle and shake minds that were previously certain, because of a certain echo and thunder in the prose that suggests it comes from very far back, and a very long way away, and from genuine authority. But may I make a request to him and any others who wish to do this? On this weblog, we prefer the 1611 Authorised ( or, as Americans call it, The King James) Version, not just because it is properly majestic, beautiful and memorable, as such a book ought to be, but also because it is in general the most accurate translation of the original scriptures into English. If you haven't come across it, and don't own a copy, it is time you did. When quoting from the Book of Psalms, the Miles Coverdale version (reproduced in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer) is also acceptable.

By the way, this is not to say that there were not a number of eloquent and enjoyable contributions, many of them instructive and thoughtful in their own right. I was glad that we touched on the fact that moral rules are primarily rules we must try to apply to our own selves, and spread by example and persuasion where possible, while acknowledging our own frequent failure to live by them, rather than things we must seek to force on others. Though of course this becomes more difficult when the wrong that is done affects a third party. I was always struck, when I lived in the USA, by a bumper sticker common on cars in liberal Maryland, which cackled "Against abortion? Don't have one". I would grind my teeth and think of having a satirical version made which said "Against murder? Don't commit one".This is of course an absolutely true parallel if you accept my position on when human life begins. But it has no effect on someone who has persuaded himself that it begins at birth.

I just felt that the substantial point was missed. Can we have another try?

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This post also slid away from the main point. One of the many reasons for my breach with the Tory Party is its serial contempt for public transport, and the assumption that a conservative person necessarily sympathises with the Jeremy Clarkson world view. This is largely for electoral advantage - a belief that people drive cars because they like it, and that every 'motorist' is not just a driver of a car, but an enthusiastic promoter of individual motor transport. Personally, I doubt this. Many people own and drive cars because they have to. Likewise home ownership is virtually compulsory if you want to live in pleasant circumstances, or to protect your savings against government-created inflation. The difference is that cars are a depreciating asset, yet people often have to borrow heavily to buy them, a well-known economic error. They are also quite heavily taxed.

And thus we got into an argument about the 'Road Fund ' licence - a name which it ceased to have in 1936. That's a very interesting piece of knowledge which I am glad to have acquired, and am grateful for. Perhaps all the pro-car chunterers, raging about why they paid for their 'Road Fund' Licences but didn't get more in return, will now revise what they said. There is no Road Fund. There is no Road Fund Licence either.

Patrick Hadley accused me of missing the point about cars and subsidy. He said "If the total raised from car-users, that is directly targeted on car use, such as petrol and car tax, is significantly greater than the amount spent on roads then that does provide strong evidence against the proposition that some roads are heavily subsidised by the taxpayer".

Well, several points. Firstly, all subsidies are subsidies, whose size is based on the government's view of the present need, not on where they got the money from, and have nothing to do with the origin of the money. You could raise £100 billion from cars, and spend none of it at all on the roads for several years (beyond unavoidable running repairs) if you needed to fight an urgent defensive war. In which case it would be true to say that the roads were not being subsidised. But would, or could ‘motorists’ then argue that 'their' money was being wrongly diverted? I think not.

If I never used a car at all, I would expect to help pay for the roads because a modern society needs roads. If I never flew, I'd expect to pay for air traffic control. The question is, how much does our society need them, and what sort of roads does it need, and how should they be balanced with other forms of ground transport. Likewise, I expect to pay for national defence, and I expect pacifists to pay for it, too since they could not be pacifists for long if someone wasn't prepared to defend their right to their batty views. There's a different sort of argument about taxation and subsidising state education.

Many people save hard and spend hard on school fees, yet also pay heavy taxes to pay for state schools they don't want to use. Others have no children. Yet all are expected to pay for a state school system. I say that is absolutely right, but that in return they should have a great deal more say about how that money should be spent, which is actually decided by a small, closed elite of 'education professionals' whose ideas about education are discredited and wrong. The same is true about transport. The transport policies of this country seem to have been agreed in private among civil servants and the road lobby some years ago, and, however reliably they continue to deliver congestion, planning blight and oil dependency, they remain unchallenged.

The parallel continues. Many people would rather not pay school fees, and only do so because the state schools are so bad where they live. Even the childless are affected by the ignorance and indiscipline of the products of bad state schools. The relation between the taxed subject and the taxing government, and the relationship between the way their money is raised and how it is spent, are the heart of politics, and far from simple. What is certain is that, the more we are taxed, the more we ought to think carefully about how our money should be spent.

Unless we are to go back to universal toll roads (and toll footpaths, come to that) we have to accept that national and local government subsidise transport. The question is, not how much money they raise from cars, but how the money should best be spent and on which form of transport. By the way, as a cyclist, I am often upbraided by drivers for having 'paid nothing for the roads'. Who says? I pay income tax and council tax, and VAT on almost everything, and duty on wine and beer. I contribute lavishly to the huge government bank account, which is then spent on many things including roads. It is absurd to imagine that there is any connection, direct or in direct, between money raised by taxing various forms of road transport, and the cost of roads. All taxation income ends up in the same pot, and gives the taxpayer a right to a general say in how the money is spent - a say that would be greater if we had better political parties, another reason for dumping the Useless Tories.

I'd also add that, if your policy directly encourages car ownership and use, plus the transfer of freight from road to rail ( and I don't think anyone would deny that the last 50 years of transport policy have done exactly that) you will increase the number of taxable vehicles, and increase the amount of taxable fuel consumed, while also decreasing the use of public transport (increasingly restricted, as in the USA, to those who cannot drive - children, the very poor, the old and infirm) who just happen to be the politically powerless. Only one group of rail travellers are politically powerful - middle-class commuters in the South East of England. Rail transport largely survives at all in this pro-car climate because, in dense metropolitan areas, even well-off adults have to travel by train to have any hope of getting to work on time. This is why they endure the overcrowding and delays and the absurd high fares. They know (though they rarely admit) that the car would be even worse. So, if, as Mr Hadley says, the car driver pays six pence a mile more to the government than is spent on roads, that is the result of so many people having been forced on to those roads by decades of biased pro-road, anti-rail, anti-bus, anti-tram, anti-bicycle and anti-pedestrian policies (and subsidies).

I would be interested, in any case, in the details of this calculation. Does it feature the cost of the annual massacre of road deaths and injuries, the devastated lives, the pensions and compensation paid to injured survivors or, prosecutions, costly medical treatment? Does it feature the rather advantageous tax arrangements for company cars? Does it feature the other indirect costs of mass car transport in debilitating back pain (one of the main causes of lost working days ) and the high incidence of non-hereditary heart disease and gross obesity associated with and resulting from mass use of car transport? Does it include a figure for the dependence of this country on the world's most despotic regimes for the only practicable fuel for these cars, and the military costs resulting from our need to defend our interests in these dangerous regions? Does it include a factor for the interest costs of the loans taken out to build the roads in the first place? Does it quantify the noise bought and grime spread over huge urban areas by the presence of arterial roads?

How does it measure the social cost to children of not being able to play safely outside or walk any distance? Where in these accounts do we find a true costing of the constant depreciation of the national road stock, its thousands of crumbling bridges and constantly repaired surfaces? Or of the £114,000 cost per unit (as recently revealed) of the light-controlled pedestrian crossings which are increasingly the only type that drivers obey, and not even always then?

A number of people confused the issue by concentrating on the argument that there are unpleasant people on trains. Well, there sometimes are, but, as in so many other areas, this problem has been allowed to grow partly because so many people - especially politicians -have been allowed to insulate themselves from reality. Nobody is keener than I on restoring order and civility to the public square. But as long as the powerful and the influential imagine that a private car is the only normal or desirable form of transport, this is unlikely. What they don't experience, they won't grieve over. You cannot expect the trains and buses to become quieter, safer or more orderly until politicians and opinion-makers travel on them regularly.

Why does the government have a fleet of several hundred chauffeured cars, for ministers nobody has ever heard of? If, as is stated, their red boxes are not safe on buses and trains, then the buses and trains need to be made safe. For if a red box isn't safe, and then people aren't safe. To provide these understrappers with cars is a bit like the action of the old Soviet Communist Party, when sewage from Yalta began to pollute the private beaches of the General Secretary's Crimea dacha. There were two possible solutions: one, build a new sewerage system for Yalta; two, build a nice new dacha further down the coast. Guess which they picked? It's the same with schools. If every pro-comprehensive politician was obliged to send his own children to a bog-standard urban comprehensive, we'd have grammar schools back in five years.

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Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on SundayI promised a posting on this subject, but will keep it brief for now. It is fashionable, especially among neo-cons, to call for the abolition of the TV licence. I am against this. Evidence from the USA shows that privately run broadcast networks - ABC, CBS and NBC - are just as dominated by received liberal opinion as the BBC. Privately-owned CNN is so politically correct that it makes the BBC look conservative - it actually refers to Burma as 'Myanmar' and Rangoon as 'Yangon' (I deal with the business of city names below in another posting). I also notice many default liberal attitudes on Sky TV in this country, especially in the assumptions of interviewers and their unconscious use of language and selection of angles from which to examine stories.

From what I have seen of Rupert Murdoch's Fox news in the USA ( and what exactly are its viewing figures?) , it is certainly not liberal, but its absurd claim to be 'fair and balanced' when it is wholly partisan and committed to the 'War on Terror' does no service to the cause of true balance on TV . This would be served by the open acknowledgement of bias by presenters and reporters, and a commitment to ensure that rival views were aired, and that on occasion programmes should be presented by adversaries, so that ( at the very least ) no public figure was ever interviewed by a sympathiser. Because of the licence fee, we do have a faint but actual chance of compelling the BBC to behave in this way. Long years of criticisms are beginning to have an effect and, redoubled, may actually achieve change since the BBC is going to need all the allies it can get if it is to survive thee next 20 years intact. I find it encouraging that many intelligent BBC figures, such as Andrew Marr, are now at last accepting that the Corporation does have a strong cultural bias to the left. It took time. This was a case I first made - to universal derision from BBC types - more than ten years ago.

I should declare an interest here. Channel Four has actually moved faster than the BBC on this, allowing me and several other unconventional voices the chance to make authored programmes which acknowledge the author's partiality openly and honestly. (BBC4 has also given me one chance to do this, but -given its viewing figures - this struck me as a bit tokenist). I think this is because Channel Four made little secret of its leftist bias at the outset, and now recognises that much of what it originally fought for has become orthodoxy, and that truly radical programmes are quite likely to be made by conservatives nowadays. It doesn't try, like the BBC, to pretend that it was ever unbiased in the past. So it is easier for it to accommodate different views openly now.